Bloomsbury Academic The Community of Eternal Life: The Study of the Meaning of Life for the Johannine Community

The Community of Eternal Life is a work which employs a peculiar exegetical methodology of a four-level reading of the text to demonstrate the fact that the vision of eternal life played a key role in holding together the disparate groups that lie behind the Fourth Gospel and the three Johannine epistles. To demonstrate this claim, David A. Ihenacho embarks on an in depth consideration of the thematic nature of the Johannine idea of eternal life, an examination of the integrative power of the Johannine concept of eternal life and the implication of its exegetical and theological contents. Ihenacho then advances from a historical consideration of the eternal life texts, to sociological and literary considerations, and finally to a theological consideration.